Office 365 – new vision of Microsoft’s cloud services

10/19/2010

Today it was announced the rebrant of BPOS to Office 365. However, the change is not the name but also the services offered and political unification of Microsoft online services.

Also was announced by Steve Balmer termination functions of Chief Architect of Microsoft, a position he was Bill Gates and currently occupied by Ray Ozzie. In an open letter Balmer comments that Ozzie will be leaving this post and it started a major shift in Microsoft’s culture by evangelizing the concept of cloud computing and SaaS (software as a service) that Microsoft is a paradigm, since always sold software as a product. Office 365 is its smokin’ in function!!!

To understand what has changed in terms of resources is interesting post time Exchange, where they describe the new features, which for me are:

Now you can coexistence of Exchange 2007/2010 servers within the enterprise (on premises) with cloud servers. Anytime the administrator may transfer the account to the internal cloud and vice versa by new integrated console.

Integration of internal PBX with the voice mail Exchange online allowing voicemail in the cloud

Another change is the migration of Live@edu services and Office Live Small Business to the new Office 365.

Finally, the Office Web App (available as Beta at Hotmail) now available on the Web, allowing users of Office 365 using SharePoint online documents directly over the Web without requiring office in the machine, as happens today. Note however that in Office 365 package is included the license of the desktop version of Office Professional 2010.

This whole movement is an integration of services, creation of new services with Lync (Office Communications), creating a strong name (Office 365) and offer services that can compete with Google of equals, even if the price of Office 365 is taller than the Google Apps.